Case Number 06974: Small Claims Court

ANDROMEDIA

The Charge

Exciting sci-fi and fantasy from the director of Audition and Ichi
the Killer!

The Case

If you've ever wondered what a Disney Channel adaptation of a William Gibson
novel would look like -- and who hasn't, really? -- check out Andromedia,
a 1998 film by Japanese cult cinema maestro Takashi Miike (Audition,
Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer). In Andromedia, Miike takes
classic cyberpunk themes like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and
high-tech megacorporate crime, and wraps them up in a lightweight teen romance
starring Japanese pop stars, complete with a performance by J-pop boy band Da
Pump. The resulting film is about as cheesy as you might expect, and doesn't
even approach plausibility, but as a disposable teenybopper fantasy it's not
entirely horrible -- especially for a film featuring a band called "Da
Pump."

Pop idol Hiroko Shimabukuro stars as Mai, a teenaged girl with a close-knit
group of friends (portrayed by members of Shimabukuro's pop band Speed) and a
boyfriend, Yuu (Kenji Harada, Battle Royale II). When Mai is killed in a
road accident, we learn that her computer scientist father has recorded Mai's
memories and personality onto a computer chip. He brings the girl back to life,
after a fashion, as a simulation who calls herself "Ai." (Get it?
"Mai" equals "Ai" equals "A.I." The film makes
sure to repeat this point a few times, in case anyone misses it.) Ai's
activation brings her to the attention of an evil techno-magnate
(cinematographer Christopher Doyle, in one of his deservedly rare forays into
acting) who wants to use this fantastic technology to give himself
cyber-immortality. The evil techno-magnate sends legions of thugs dressed in
expensive suits to grab Ai, but Mai's father embeds the Ai program into a
laptop, which finds its way into the hands of a heartbroken Yuu -- and the chase
is on.

According to the production notes, Andromedia is supposed to be
Miike's entry into mainstream, commercial filmmaking, but it's hard to
distinguish the look and feel of this film from the low-budget B-movies Miike
grinds out as regularly as Metamucil-enhanced bowel movements. It appears that
most of the production money went into expensive CGI effects and elaborate props
(like a bizarro Frankenstein computer adorned with miles of crazily tangled
wires and duct pipes), leaving the rest of the film to look like a shot-on-video
TV movie. Fans of Miike's trademark disregard for narrative coherence or logic
will be completely at home with Andromedia's slapdash editing and gaping
plot holes, not to mention an abrupt detour into MTV territory as Da Pump
appears just long enough to drive a car off a cliff and then segue into a
musical performance complete with pyrotechnic explosions. Even diehard Miike
fans will be sorely tested, though, by Doyle's shorts-clad villain, who looks
like a slightly more butch version of Richard Simmons.

In Miike's defense, it's entirely possible that he set out deliberately to
create a kind of homage to bad '80s B-movies. Starting with Doyle's
MTV-circa-1985 fashion sense and extending throughout the film's sets and
costumes, up to and including Ai's Wargames-era synthesized voice,
there's a weirdly retro vibe to Andromedia -- only the CGI keeps it from
fitting right in with low-budget '80s flicks like Trancers or 1984's
PC-in-love fantasy Electric Dreams. It's also possible that Miike is
satirizing the cyberpunk genre, as payback to Gibson and other cyberpunk authors
and filmmakers, for their relentless fetishizing of Japanese culture.

Or maybe it's just a crappy movie. If Andromedia is meant to be
satire, the humor is too subtle to offset such wincingly awful scenes as
[insert any one of a dozen scenes of Yuu mooning pathetically over Mai's
virtual image] or the mawkish obviousness of the teenybopper tragic romance
(after Mai's death, there's actually a shot of cherry blossoms falling onto a
pool of blood). The sad thing about Andromedia is that Da Pump actually
ends up being one of the best things about it -- their dancing and singing are
pretty lousy, but they have a fairly engaging screen presence, and their brief
comic-relief cameo made me wish I was watching them in a goofy comedy instead of
this rambling trudge through cyberspace.

Still, Andromedia is basically watchable, provided you go in with low
expectations and a high tolerance for teen melodrama. A late scene, with Yuu and
his virtual girlfriend contemplating each other on a beach, even achieves a
melancholy poetry. Moments like that reveal glimpses of the film
Andromedia could have been -- a lighthearted, romantic take on
relationships in the Information Age -- rather than the marginally diverting
techno-thriller that it is.

Andromedia gets a fairly perfunctory DVD release, with an okay
anamorphic widescreen picture that fares better during its CGI shots than the
occasionally fuzzy, low-contrast live action footage. The transfer is fine,
considering the subpar production values of the source material, but nothing
special. Audio is also just okay -- the Dolby Digital 2.0 track is a trifle flat
and center-heavy during dialogue scenes, but the effects and music are crisp and
robust. Unfortunately, the scenes in which Doyle speaks (in English) are
overdubbed by a harsh, robotic Japanese translation -- it's supposed to be some
kind of instant-translation program in the film -- that makes it impossible to
make out what he's saying. The mediocre (assuming the characters aren't
meant to sound like characters out of an elementary school textbook)
subtitles don't help at all. So, it would have been helpful if this DVD had
offered an alternate audio track without that weird robotic voice. As it is,
it's a glaring annoyance for English-speaking viewers of the film.

The DVD is pretty light on features. There's a brief text-based essay by
Miike scholar Tom Mes (author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike)
that offers some cursory insights into the film's inception and its significance
to the Miike canon. Also included are cast and crew biographies, a theatrical
trailer, and a gallery of stills.

I didn't find Andromedia's 109-minute running time as difficult to
sit through as I anticipated; if you can make it through the first half hour or
so, you might actually find yourself intermittently entertained. But only
hardcore Miike completists -- and 13-year-old girls -- have much of a chance of
really enjoying Andromedia. In a body of work not known for its
consistency, Andromedia falls into the lowest tier of Miike's films.